The present invention relates to all information visualizing system for presenting information about items to a user by appropriately arranging visualizations of the items in a spatial image which is virtually generated by a computer.
Recently, many techniques have been proposed concerning information visualizing systems, which provide frames for presenting information about items to a user by appropriately arranging visualizations of the items in a virtual space generated by a computer. An example of the information visualizing system is disclosed in a Japanese patent application laid open as a Provisional Publication No. 63324/'98, entitled "A Data Management System and an Icon Display Apparatus."
In this prior art, files of a database are visualized with three-dimensional icons of buildings each having a form and a size determined according to type and size of a file to be represented. In cities of a virtual land generated by a computer, each of the buildings is arranged in a section of a town according to attributes of the file.
A user walks around in the town by changing his viewpoint or magnifying/demagnifying the virtual space making use of an input device of the computer. When a target building is found, the user specifies it with a pointing device for opening the file represented by the target building, for example, and, when another processing such as selecting a record of the file is required than the default processing to open the file, indicates the required processing to the system by performing a certain manipulation.
As described in connection with the above example, a frame for presenting information has been provided in conventional information visualizing systems, which enables a user to selectively obtain information of a desired item related to a visual object selected among visual objects displayed one after another, by performing a walk-around manipulation, that is, by changing his virtual viewpoint or magnifying/demagnifying the virtual space in the frame, or by performing rearrangement of the visual objects.
Further, there have been also developed many techniques, in the conventional information visualizing system, for presenting related information of the item represented by the visual object, such as bibliographical information or a book list of the same author, for example, when the target item is a book. Among the techniques, a method of displaying related information of an item in an additional window by directly pointing to the visual object of the item or a method of displaying the same by pointing a command icon or selecting a menu command is widely used.
However, the conventional information visualizing system can be said to remain at a stage to provide a frame for presenting information because of following two problems.
The first problem is that the user has been forced to perform another manipulation for obtaining the related information than the manipulation to control the virtual space for searching the target objects such as the walk-around manipulation. The manipulation for obtaining the related information has different nature from the manipulation for changing the virtual space, and must be performed intentionally by the user every time suspending the manipulation to control the virtual space. Therefore, the user has not been able to obtain related information of different items successively by manipulating the virtual space, or to perform the walk-around manipulation referring to related information which is revised one by one.
The second problem is that the situation of the virtual space does not reflected an estimation of dialog context between the system and the user.
Here, the dialog context means global to local information concerning processes of dialog performed or to be performed between the system and the user, which includes information concerning user's intention, manipulation kinds and manipulation sequences from the past to the future. "Searching for a book" is an example of global information concerning a manipulation kind, and "operating a mouse for selecting a command button to execute the search" is an example of local information concerning the manipulation kind. And, the estimation of the dialog context means, for example, to estimate information which the user is requiring presently or to estimate a manipulation of the user to be performed next, according to a manipulation sequence performed by the user. The dialog context has an intimate relation with the situation of the virtual space at the time, which is displayed as the results of the dialog context. For example, when a specific book is displayed with a large size in an information visualizing system for presenting book information making use of a virtual library, the user can be considered to be interested in detail information of the book. On the other hand, from a situation of the virtual space where a general view of several bookshelves is displayed in the virtual library, it can be estimated that the user is narrowing down target genres from genres corresponding to the bookshelves displayed at the time.
Returning to the second problem, the related information is better to be generated in sufficient consideration of the dialog context between the system and the user. However, the situation of the virtual space is not reflected to the dialog context in the conventional information visualizing system. Therefore, only direct and superficial information of the dialog context, such as simple designation of the target object, or in other words, but the dialog context for obtaining the related-information, performed explicitly by the user by suspending manipulation to the virtual space, has not been considered for generating the related information, resulting in a stiff presentation of the related information.